New Window Link Control

I was trying to use this script on my site so that external links open in new windows, and it works great.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/standards-compliant-world

My only problem is that I would like to use Markdown and don’t type out links the “long way”. My hope was that I might of been able to combine the power of the link above with this:

http://www.noscope.com/journal/2004/10/link-target-preferences

Unfortunately, I can’t even get that to work out of the box.

I guess, in the end, I am looking for someone with some javascript experience to put something simple together so that it goes to check to see if a link is local (like the second links does with http://www.mysiteurl.com or mysiteurl.com), if not… it automagically throws a “ref=external” into it.

Thanks
-DR